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British Prime Minister’s office on July 23, 2002: “C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” “The secret Downing Street memo,” The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece ). Bush had regularly claimed that military force was not a preferred option and that a diplomatic resolution was still being sought, a lie that the MSM had never contested.

43. On polling data as a reflection of the disenlightened state in which the U.S. media keep the general public, see, e.g., Steven Kull et al., “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” Program on International Policy Attitudes (http://www.pipa.org/), October 2, 2003.

44. “The Times and Iraq,” Editorial, New York Times, May 26, 2004; Howard Kurtz, “The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story; Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page,” Washington Post, August 12, 2004.

45. “Unraveling Iran’s Nuclear Secrets,” Editorial, New York Times, May 9, 2003.

46. These two points have been stated many times over the years. For one recent example, see Roger Stern, “The Iranian petroleum crisis and United States national security,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 104, No. 1, January 2, 2007.

47. According to the U.S. Government’s Energy Information Administration, as of January 2007, Iran ranked second in the world with 136 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. This places Iran behind first-ranked Saudi Arabia (262 billion) and ahead of third-ranked Iraq (115 billion).

48. These percentages derive from Nexis database searches under the “U.S. Newspapers and Wires” category, compiled month-by-month for the periods reported. The exact search parameters were: iran and nuclear and weapons and not iraq.

49. Steven R. Weisman, “New U.S. Concern on Iran’s Pursuit of Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, May 8, 2003. Just one week earlier, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation John Wolf had accused Iran of possessing “an alarming, clandestine program to acquire sensitive nuclear capabilities that we believe make sense only as part of a nuclear weapons program.” In Louis Charboneau, “U.N. nuclear watchdog considers Iran compliance,” Reuters, May 8, 2003.

50. These totals derive from Nexis database searches under the “U.S. Newspapers and Wires” category and for the New York Times, compiled for the periods reported. The exact search parameters were: nuclear and iran w/10 defian***.

51. Ali Akbar Dareini, “Iran’s president says new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy Israel,” Associated Press, October 26, 2005.

52. Nazila Fathi, “Iran’s New President Says Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map’,” New York Times, October 27, 2005; and Ambassador Dan Gillerman, A/60/449-S/2005/681, October 27, 2005. “I am writing with regard to the recent statement by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Gillerman said, “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he declared, ‘Israel must be wiped off the map of the world…and God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

53. Nexis database searches under the “U.S. Newspapers and Wires” category for the period October 26, 2005 through July 31, 2008. The exact search parameters were: israel and “wiped off the map”.

54. Juan Cole, “Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist,” Informed Comment (Weblog), May 3, 2006 (http://www.juancole.com-/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-andhitchens.html). To quote Cole at length: “‘The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)’. Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope—that the occupation of Jerusalem